How to reach us

Daytime Parking: Pay and Display in local streets or underground in the Chelsea Football Ground directly opposite the gallery.

Evening Parking: All local parking is ‘Residents Only’ between 6.30 and 8pm and a towaway policy is enforced. Please use the underground carpark.

Another empty beach, North Norfolk 2019

Watercolour

40 x 60cm

£1,920

A pond in the woods 2007

Watercolour

113x83cm

£7,500

Another gap in the hedge 2019

Watercolour

56 x 63cm

£2,825

Barn Door 2019

Watercolour (large)

75 x 50cm

£3,000

Barn door VIII 2018

Watercolour

30 x20cm

£480

Barn door X

Watercolour

30 x 20cm

£480

Bull and cow 2017

Watercolour

56 x 60cm

£2,690

Clacton Pier 2018

Watercolour

40 x 87cm

£2,785

Colne Valley 2006

Watercolour

50 x 75cm

£3,000

Concrete and contrails

Watercolour

75 x 50cm

£3,000

Dawn 2019

Watercolour

25 x 40cm

£800

Dawn at Luxor 2010/2011

Watercolour

40 x 104cm

£2,500

Deux Viaducs 1992

Watercolour

53 x 73cm

£3,000

Ditch and trees 2017

Watercolour

45 x 76cm

£2,735

Early autumn, Chappel Viaduct 2007

Watercolour

125 x 150cm

£15,000

Fallen Trees, Dooley’s Field 2018

Watercolour

76 x 56cm

£3,400

Footpath to Flatford Mill 1 3/4 miles 2018

Watercolour

60 x60cm

£2,880

Greenwich Power Station 2017

Watercolour

100 x 50 cm

£4,000

Gulls on Groynes 2019

Watercolour

40 x 60cm

£1,920

John Deere Tractor 2016

Watercolour

60 x 89cm

£4,275

Lane Road, Wakes Colne 2008

Watercolour

100 x 130cm

£10,400

Oak in winter 2016

Watercolour

122 x 122cm

£12,000

Railway underbridge near Manningtree 2019

Watercolour

67 x 51cm

£2,735

Rue Boileau, Peret 2017

Watercolour

75 x 60cm

£3,600

Rue Courtaine, Peret 2017

Watercolour

74 x 49cm

£2,900

Salisbury Cathedral, West Façade 2017

Watercolour

122 x 92cm

£8,980

Scrub 2019

Watercolour

84 x 64cm

£4,300

Sunset (I) 2019

Watercolour

27 x 40cm

£865

Sunset (II) 2019

Watercolour

27 x 40cm

£865

Sunset with Viaduct 2019

Watercolour

25 x 40cm

£800

Sunset, Walberswick 2019

Watercolour

90 x 60cm

£4,320

The bottom of my garden 2004

Watercolour

150 x 150cm

£18,000

Towards Sizewell 2019

Watercolour

39 x 59cm

£1,920

Under Clacton Pier 2017

Watercolour

75 x 50cm

£3,000

View from an upstairs window 2019

Watercolour

53 x 60cm

£2,545

Woodpile beneath the bridge 2019

Watercolour

55 x 55cm

£2,420

Foreword

Władysław Mirecki or Waj to his friends, was born to Polish parents in Chelmsford in 1956. He paints mostly Essex landscapes. In fact, he paints things that people who favour certain types of installation art probably wouldn't think of as cutting- edge. People who know the beauty of Essex and the wider East Anglian countryside, however, will recognise the quality of Mirecki's defiantly coherent work. It sells, of course.

Waj, a completely self-taught artist, has never not painted. When he says: “I never went to art school,” the statement carries an air of mystification, almost as if he were talking about a strange club in some distant city of which he'd heard, yet had never felt the urge to visit. Despite being regarded as 'good at art', instead he gained a science degree, later moving on to industrial design in London. Terribly unhappy there, after a while, whilst still in his twenties, he fled the metropolis in order to “take up the brush.” Returning to Essex in the 1980s, he became a labourer, laying tracks for the Chappel Railway Museum and settling down there to paint the landscape.

For here were the rolling contours of the West Colne Valley. The place has everything a traditional English landscaper might desire: a winding river and acres of fecund farmland with tree-lined country lanes, all straddled by a stunning Victorian railway viaduct. For over three decades the artist has followed the changing seasons with the persistence of a particularly obsessive stalker. From the buttercupped spring meadows, into the deep green hollow-ways of summer woodland,he takes us back out, to the glacier-mint light of winter fields. His landscapes are nearly all un-peopled. Waj will tell you that this is because the countryside nowadays is mostly empty. He wanted to paint his immediate locale and reckons it took him a decade before his work began to do the landscape justice. His paintings are realistic, although un-blighted by any sterile photographic quality. The artist doesn't over-idealise his subjects. Where, for instance, a road encroaches upon one of his landscapes, he includes its markings and yellow lines. In years to come, such things will tell the viewer as much about the countryside in the early 21st century as a Constable painting does about the early 19th. The influences of John Constable and John Atkinson Grimshaw, remain present in Waj Mirecki's work, like two wardens patrolling a deserted country park.

Of recent years, Waj has taken to occasional studies of urban or industrial sites. These places with their wire and concrete, sometimes take on a wildness of their own. They seem even more alien for providing within their structure the only evidence of the people who built them. In more recent years, the artist has painted on the coast:not only the pretty dunes and houseboats of coastal Suffolk, but Clacton, a rugged old Essex seaside resort perched on the fleece of the cold North Sea.

Władysław Mirecki's work frequently concerns itself with sites once used for work. It successfully conveys the eerie beauty of such places, long after their labourers have gone and nature has taken over. The great secret here, however, is that Mirecki's seemingly unpopulated paintings are nothing of the sort. Because you, the viewer are always included in them. And the artist is standing right there beside you.

by Martin Newell

Władysław Mirecki

1956 Born Chelmsford, Essex of Polish parents. He is self-taught, having painted all his life including periods gaining his science degree at Kingston Polytechnic, London (1975-78); as an industrial designer and co-proprietor of Chappel Galleries (1986 – ).